annathepiper | Amazon vs. Macmillan: FIGHT! (Reply)

I spent most of this weekend at the filk convention Conflikt, and that was great fun, but even as a bunch of geeky music was going on I kept an eye on the kerfuffle that exploded between Amazon and Macmillan. The issue at hand appears to be the pricing of ebooks, and as an ebook author, this is of course Relevant to My Interests.

The issue as I understand it is that Amazon and Macmillan are having a huge dispute about how much ebooks ought to cost. Macmillan is aiming for a variable pricing structure from $14.99 down to as low as $5.99, whereas Amazon is standing adamant about $9.99 as a price point. (Side note: since a lot of the ebooks I buy tend to run lower than even $9.99, even when purchased on Amazon, the nuances of the ebook pricing structure are still a mystery to me. But I digress.) They couldn’t reach an agreement, and so Amazon up and pulled all Macmillan titles out of its database, not only the ebooks, but the print titles as well.

To wit, whoa.

Amazon has since capitulated but as of this morning, Macmillan authors are still reporting that new copies of their works are still not available for purchase on Amazon. And the agents I’m seeing chime in on the matter are pretty sure this isn’t over yet by a long shot. I’m still thinking hard about what I want to do about this, if anything. I’ve seen a lot of people asserting that this has been the last straw for them, and that they will cease doing any further business with Amazon; I’ve seen several authors now go and pull all links to Amazon’s pages for their works off their sites.

It’s just one great big mess, and I’m hoping it’ll settle itself out soon. ‘Cause again, Relevant to My Interests. Drollerie is tiny enough that I can’t exactly tell people not to buy Faerie Blood or Defiance on Amazon, if that’s where they want to buy it–especially given that neither of these titles have shown up on Barnes and Noble’s site yet, and Fictionwise doesn’t have Defiance, either. But man, it’s making me inclined more and more just to point folks directly at Drollerie’s own store. Where we don’t have any DRM anyway!

Link roundup, for those of you who want to see more on the matter:

Agent Nathan Bransford has a good summation here
John Scalzi is less than pleased
Tobias Buckell goes into the differences between what print books cost and what ebooks cost, which is good reading if you want a handle on why ebooks might not necessarily be as cheap as you think they should be
Charles Stross is also less than pleased, but attempts to provide an outsider’s guide to the fight
And agent Kristin Nelson does a quick overview of what exactly Amazon and Macmillan have themselves said on the matter
ETA: Agent Jennifer Jackson chimes in with her own link roundup and reactions
ETA: And a kerfuffle of this magnitude just wouldn’t be complete without a word (or many!) from Fandom Wank!
ETA: Scott Westerfeld has a good summation, and I think that by and large I agree with his analysis
ETA: An interesting counterargument suggests that even if Amazon is the one who had to capitulate here, they’re still going to win this fight